BiographyHistory

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Sarah Holland-Batt has lived in Australia and the United States. She was awarded a Bachelor of Arts with Honours (Class I) in Literary Studies from the University of Queensland in 2005, and a Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing (2008). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and she has been poetry editor for the literary magazine Vanguard and for the youth website Vibewire. She has lectured in Literary Stdies and Creative Writing at The Queensland University of Technology and in 2010 she received a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship to study a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at New York University for two years.

'Spanning poems written in the United States, Central America, Europe and Australia, The Hazards is a dazzling and inventive new collection from award-winning poet Sarah Holland-Batt. Opening with a vision of a leveret's agonizing death by Myxomatosis and closing with a lover disappearing into dangerous waters, Holland-Batt reflects a predatory world rife with hazards both real and imagined. Her cosmopolitan poems careen through diverse geographical territory - from haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua, the still Danish interiors of Hammershoi and the serial killer stalking Long Island Sound - and engage everywhere with questions of violence and loss, erasure and extinction. Charged with Holland-Batt's mercurial imagination and swift lyricism, this unsettling and darkly intelligent collection inhabits an uncertain world with a questioning eye and clear mind, unafraid to veer 'straight into turbulence'.' (Publication summary)